The Year of Magical Thinking

Locations
Call Number: BOCD 921 Didion, Joan, Adult BOCD / Nonfiction / Biography / Didion, Joan
On Shelf At: Downtown Library, Westgate Branch

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	BOCD 921 Didion, Joan	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Westgate Adult A/V 4-week checkout	Adult BOCD / Nonfiction / Biography / Didion, Joan	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Malletts Adult A/V 4-week checkout	Adult BOCD / Nonfiction / Biography / Didion, Joan	4-week checkout	Due 05-09-2024

Compact disc.
Read by Barbara Caruso.
""Life changes fast. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends." These were among the first words Joan Didion wrote in January 2004. Her daughter was lying unconscious in an intensive care unit, a victim of pneumonia and septic shock. Her husband, John Gregory Dunne, was dead. The night before New Year's Eve, while they were sitting down to dinner, he suffered a massive and fatal coronary. The two had lived and worked side by side for nearly 40 years. The weeks and months that followed "cut loose any fixed idea I had about death, about illness, about probability and luck-- about marriage and children and memory-- about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself." In The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion explores with electric honesty and passion a private yet universal experience. Her portrait of a marriage-- and a life, in good times and bad-- will speak directly to anyone who has ever loved a husband, a wife, or a child" -- from publisher's web site.

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Heart Wrenching submitted by kimberlina on July 2, 2012, 9:49am A heart wrenching story of the author's year dealing with tremendous losses. Well read by the narrator.

The details of grief submitted by ccrose on August 5, 2019, 2:47pm Grief is a state of mind that we only have to use (hopefully) a few times in our lives and it’s peculiar how the body, mind and spirit work so slowly, closing the giant rip left to negotiate. Or not.
Joan Didion’s own labyrinth of grief took over and that altered reality came along, wandering through new circumstances made real to us by her details:
Waiting a long time to remove his clothes and shoes, “He’ll need some shoes...” thinking magically he will come back, taps that part of the mind and spirit that works so hard to avoid the writhing pain that he won’t. That familiar feeling that nothing is in its ‘right place...can’t find a blanket, my keys, the pepper shaker. ‘ All those objects that serve us without complaint have suddenly, apparently, left...her mental playback of his death at the dinner table; over and over, she reviews the moments before, the sounds of a person eating then not eating.
How impossible it is to look death straight in the eye. The other shoe will fall: right away: her only daughter will be hospitalized, seriously sick. I read this and wondered if I should prepare, rehearse how to keep moving, let the thinking parts go and just breath through loss. It’s going to show up, sometime. I recommend this book for young adults as well as those who are aware their lease is running out.